Homestar™ is a free rating system tool that aims to help you understand how your whole house measures up in terms of sustainability and healthy living. It rates your home on a scale of zero to ten stars and gives you recommendations on how you could improve.

You might be surprised to discover that most New Zealand homes do not score above two on the star rating scale. So how can you shift your home up the scale? Here are some key tips from Homestar that will make your home more sustainable.

Health and Comfort

If you are building new, the following tips will help you create a home that is higher up the Homestar scale. If you’re renovating, think about how you can make improvements in any of the following areas.

Ceiling insulation should be the number one priority in any household. Without it you won’t be able to move your house up the Homestar scale. Good quality and well-installed ceiling insulation will significantly reduce heat loss from a house, and reduce your heating bills.

Avoid downlights in your ceiling. They significantly reduce the effectiveness of insulation because it is like having holes in your ceiling. There are special downlights that avoid this, ask your lighting supplier.

Only half of New Zealand kitchens are adequately ventilated and most bathrooms are poorly vented, relying only on an open window. Ensuring that kitchen hobs and bathrooms are actively vented to the outside with a good fan, will dramatically decrease the moisture inside your home. This makes heating easier and cheaper and goes a long way to reducing condensation on windows.

Heating

Space heating accounts for about one third of all the energy used in an average Kiwi home. There are all manner of methods for heating our homes, from wood burners and heat pumps to the older style oil or electric bar heaters - which vary widely in terms of their environmental impact. So, choosing energy-efficient, healthy heating options that minimise carbon emissions will help move your home up the Homestar scale.

In most of New Zealand, it is actually possible to design and build a house that would need very little heating, other than the sun. This can be achieved with good orientation to the sun, excellent insulation and putting in heavy materials like concrete which can warm up naturally. If you are building, find a designer who can provide thermal modelling as part of the design to optimise this from the start.

Heat pumps are a very popular choice for heating these days. If you are using a heat pump, make sure that it has a good Energy Star rating. You can find a list of these on the EECA website.

Unvented, portable gas or LPG heaters should be avoided. They are one of the most expensive ways of heating a home. Even worse, they release toxic gases and moisture into the air inside a home.

Water

How your home uses water will also affect the Homestar rating. Here are some things to think about:
Is it possible to install an approved rainwater tank on your property? Doing so will greatly reduce your home’s mains water usage and help boost your rating. Does your shower use more than 9 litres of water per minute? Simply installing a special low flow showerhead will still give a great shower experience and direct savings of up to $200 per year in water and energy bills.

While the above areas are the main ways you can boost your homes sustainability, there are a number of other simple ways that will contribute to a positive rating. Make sure there is a dedicated space inside the house for separating and temporarily storing recyclable glass, plastic and paper, and an outside space for transferring it to collection points.

Get into composting. A compost bin or a worm farm on your home’s site will add to your rating.

Use Environmental Choice products whenever you’re renovating, as the Homestar tool takes account of these when calculating your rating.

A house site that includes native plants, a vegetable garden and fruit trees will have extra points added to its Homestar score, as these things have health and environmental benefits.

For more guidance, rate your home for free at www.homestar.org.nz